Cunningham, 48, was searching for a way to take advantage of that imbalance when he met Michael O’Keeffe, Riversdale’s chief executive officer, at a mining conference in Cape Town in February 2007. Busting out his roadshow Power-Point presentation, O’Keeffe showed Cunningham and Passport geologist Neil Adshead how drilling results indicated that a site in Mozambique might be a world-class find. Cunningham was impressed that O’Keeffe had given up a plum job as managing director of the Australian unit of Glencore International AG, the Swiss commodities trading giant, to join Riversdale. “It was important that this astute operator took this kind of personal risk,” Cunningham says. “That was a positive for me.” Glencore raised $10 billion in an initial public offering on May 19. Passport bought a small number of Riversdale shares on the Australian Securities Exchange. Then, in February 2008, Cunningham and Adshead journeyed to the highlands of western Mozambique and inspected Riversdale’s Benga project by helicopter and by foot. Considerable Risks Cunningham saw coal come out of the ground when workers drilled wells and dug holes for latrines at a mining camp, and seams of the black rock were visible throughout the area. Riversdale says its Mozambique projects possess 13 billion tons of coal reserves, much of it the highly sought coking variety. Cunningham returned to San Francisco bearing a piece of Benga coal for Burbank and told him that the mine had huge potential and considerable risks. Riversdale had to secure numerous operating rights and permits from the Mozambique government and build railroad lines and port facilities to export the coal. Even so, by December 2010 Passport was Riversdale’s No. 2 investor, with a 16 percent stake worth more than $535 million, according to Bloomberg data. Burbank, Cunningham and O’Keeffe sealed their deal by buying a racehorse together.